Fr Stephen Smuts

See also: Can You Come to Jesus Without Church?

YouTube videos go viral all the time, but sermons rarely do.

Enter Jefferson Bethke, a young “spoken-word” poet who recently posted the video “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus.” It has been viewed more than 10 million times in the past 10 days.

The video opens with an eerie soundtrack and the phrase “Jesus>Religion” in a stark, white typeface. His poem begins, “What if I told you, Jesus came to abolish religion?”

In a polished, hip style, he continues with such controversial questions for four minutes: “If religion is so great, why has it started so many wars? Why does it build huge churches, but fails to feed the poor?” Mr. Bethke describes religion as no more than “behavior modification” and “a long list of chores.” This leads him to conclude, “Jesus and religion are on opposite spectrums.” And his grand finale: “So know I hate religion, in fact I literally resent it.

Other YouTube users have posted response videos, and countless bloggers have commented on the quality of his poetry, the sharpness of the production and the errors in his theology. Among the most ardent critics are Catholics who see Catholic-bashing in Mr. Bethke’s attack against organized religion, particularly in his suggestion that religion is “just following some rules.”

On his blog “Bad Catholic,” Marc Barnes highlights Mr. Bethke’s indictments of religion for building huge churches at the expense of the poor and telling “single Moms God doesn’t love them if they’ve had a divorce.” Though Mr. Barnes agrees with some of the poem, he writes, “I can’t help but think, in the midst of all this, that this hating-religion-loving-Jesus thing is the logical consequence of Protestantism”…

… Mr. Bethke… ”perfectly captures the mood, and in my mind the confusion, of a lot of earnest, young Christians” who interpret the word religion to mean “self-righteousness, moral preening, and hypocrisy.”

… The notion that “Christianity is not a religion, but a relationship” has been echoing through the sanctuaries of evangelical, and particularly nondenominational, churches since at least the 1970s.

Read it all here.

… advocating for a kind of Christianity that is free of the “bondage” of religion opens the door to dangerous theological anarchy that is all too common among young evangelicals and absolutely antithetical to biblical Christianity.